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Jade Jun

Breathing Lessons

M.A./MC student, Jade Jun, talks about beating asthma to sing a new song.

Jade Jun’s life, more than her songs, sings of
God’s
salvation and mercy.

“God used me to bring my family
to Christ when I was one,” she says. “I had severe
asthma when I was born. I
was hospitalized for so long that the doctor said, ‘She has
no hope. Take her
home. She’s going to die.’”

But her aunt convinced Jade’s
mother to take Jade to a pastor so that he could pray for her. The
family left
the church, and on the way home Jade’s face, which was
normally blue because
she could hardly breathe, flushed a new shade: pink.

“My mom went back to the
hospital,” Jade says, “and the doctor, who was a
Christian, said, ‘Hallelujah.
Your daughter is saved. There is no other way to describe
it.’”

Jade’s mother had secretly prayed
that if God healed her daughter she would go to church. She kept her
promise,
and eventually Jade’s entire Buddhist family became
believers.

“We can’t deny God in my family,”
she says. “It’s not possible.”

Nor can they deny Jade’s ability
to sing—and the miracle of it considering she spent her first
few years of life
fighting for breath. Today Jade, a graduate of the San Francisco
Conservatory
of Music, has won two singing competitions: one hosted by a radio
station in
the
San Francisco Bay area, and the other—the California Korean
Gospel
Competition—in which she won a round-trip ticket to her home
country of Korea,
where she competed as a finalist.

“The
winners put on a really good show, but their songs didn’t
have a message,” she
says. “I need to be in a position academically and musically
to tell people
that if you’re going to judge a Gospel competition, which are
all original
songs, you need to value their heart and their lyrics and how much they
have
biblical content instead of who puts on the best show.”

For this
reason Jade passed up a partial scholarship to study vocal performance
at the
graduate level in order to pursue instead a master’s degree
in Media and
Communication at Dallas Seminary.

“I’m happiest when I’m at church
singing for the Lord. I feel like it’s worth my time. I
can’t get enough of
it,” she says. She also can’t get enough of
learning the Scriptures and
applying the advice of her mentor at KoreanFirstBaptistChurch
in San Jose, California.
“He said, ‘These days a lot of contemporary
Christian artists or people who do
ministry don’t have seminary degrees. They have great music
backgrounds, but
they don’t have the theology. They don’t have any
biblical knowledge to back up
their music. You need to be a scholar to do
music,’” Jade says. “That really
hit home for me. If I want to lead a praise team I need to be able to
lead and
teach biblically as well as musically,” she adds.
“I need to have both sides.”

At 24 Jade defines Christian
music as “a message from one heart to another,” and
sees herself contributing
songs that reflect the message of Jesus. “When
there’s no message,” she says,
“you know there’s something wrong. Every time I
read Scripture now I try to see
if I can make that into song lyrics. It’s a different way of
thinking.”